climbsyke said:
My first post!! Wow, I was a bit taken aback by how much hate there was towards Nintendo on this site!
Anyway, there have been many comments on this thread about the lack of power the Wii 2 will have (according to rumours).
My thoughts:
1.CPU
The specs say triple core IBM CPU. The 360 had heavily scaled down PPC970 cores, the Wii 2 could have 970 cores that are scaled down far less or not scaled down at all. Throw in the less restricted clock speed (3.5ghz as opposed to 3.2ghz) and you could quite easily be talking about a CPU that is more than twice as fast/powerful.
2. GPU
The rumoured figures would already put the Wii2 GPU ahead of the competition, but that is based on off the shelf performance figures. Chances are that if the Wii 2 does indeed carry an R700 it will incorporate features from the R800 much like the XBOX 360 R500 based processor had features from the 600 range. Expect the Wii 2 processor to be closer to the R800 (R750 perhaps).
3.RAM
A massive bitching point!! Most threads I've read have had huge opposites of opinion: 512mg is fine vs Nintendo are crap because they are only putting 512mg ram in.
The way I read the leaked specs was "triple core IBM CPU, R700 based GPU with 512mg of ram. That would suggest to me that the GPU alone carries 512mg ram and the overall system ram is yet to be leaked.
That doesn't sound too bad to me, and would be a huge step over the PS3 and 360.
By the way, great thread despite the obvious Nintendo haters and the dude who keeps trying to argue that the PS3 can match a high end PC on graphics!
Hi, just registered. I agree - it seems odd that people are bashing the hardware so hard when it seems like it'll be a significant upgrade to what's currently about in consoles.
Having a triple core CPU makes sense, since even the latest PC games don't really utilize all four cores. Also, it seems logical that even thought it's a custom, triple-core IBM CPU similar to what the 360 had, it'll be based on much newer tech and should be able to do more at similar clock frequencies.
As for RAM, given that the memory was mentioned in the same sentence as the GPU, i'd agree that it seems likely this is the GPU RAM, not the total system memory. Stick in another 512MB for the system and you've got double what the PS3 and Xbox360 have. It ain't the 2, 4 or 8GB that a lot of people seem to expect, but given that just 512MB of total memory was also pretty low back in 2005 it sounds good to me.
As for the GPU, saying it's based on R700 doesn't really tell us much. The low end 4000 series cards are dreadful, but the 4870 and 4890 cards are still pretty darn fast, even by todays standards. There are plenty of videos on youtube of them crunching through todays latest and greatest games at decent framerates.
Finally, games developed on consoles always look better than their tech suggests. It's the advantage of developing on set, standardized hardware. You can optomize and tweak things to get the best possible graphics/performance. How else could the 360 manage the likes of Crysis 2, GTAIV and Metro2033?
